Two Songs of My Teacher

I have spoken before about my plant teacher doña María Luisa Tuesta Flores. She was born in September 1940, in the town of Lamas in the province of San Martín, and she died, the victim of sorcery, in July 2006. She had begun her healing career as an oracionista, a prayer healer, and, even after she became an ayahuasquera, her icaros, magic songs, remained inflected with the rhythms and melodies of prayers.

Her youth was filled with dreams and visions of angels and the Virgin Mary. She delighted in working with children; when she retrieved the soul of a child, lost through susto or manchari, sudden fright, the soul would appear to her as an angel. When she was seven years old, she had her first dream of Hermana Virgen, sister virgin, who began to teach her how to heal with plants. From that time on, she frequently had dreams in which either the Virgin Mary or an angel appeared to her. The Virgin would appear as a young and very beautiful woman, show her the healing plants, and teach her the plants to cure specific diseases. The angel would appear and tell her where in the area there was a child who was sick and needed her help. She then went to the house of the child and told the family what plant would cure the illness and how to prepare it.

She did not drink ayahuasca until she was twenty-five, when, injured in a magical attack by a vengeful sorcerer, she apprenticed herself to don Roberto Acho Jurema, already at that time a well-known healer, my own maestro ayahuasquero. Unlike many ayahuasqueros, doña María did not herself perform regular Tuesday and Friday ceremonies, although she would from time to time work together with don Roberto. Even as an ayahuasquera, she would go — as she always had — wherever her healing powers were needed.

Doña María often shook her head in dismay at my questions, my blockheaded inability to absorb the immense plant knowledge she offered to me. What I needed to learn I would learn, over time, from the plants themselves, she said; the way for me to learn was to “continue on, and all will be shown to you.” This was typical doña María. When I would say I couldn’t learn any more, she would scold me. Study, study, study, she would tell me. Follow, follow, follow.

Doña María was not a simple person, and certainly not a saint. She was genuinely warm, giving of her knowledge, impatient, dramatizing, complaining, generous, fussy, proud, unassuming, earthy, demanding, motherly. She lived as a healer in the disorderly landscape of the soul.

I feel blessed to have known her, even for such a short time. Here are two of her icaros, her healing songs.

The Telepathy Meme Again

A while ago, I wrote about what I called the telepathy meme — the tenacious idea that ayahuasca opens telepathic communication with others in the group, or allows one to see events that are distant in time or space. This latter is, of course, consistent with the Upper Amazonian idea that ayahuasca is not itself a healer but rather a teacher, which is ingested in order to get information.

Apparently it was a traveler named Rafael Zerda Bayón who first suggested, in 1905, both the idea that ayahuasca visions were telepathic and the corresponding name telepathine for its active constituent. The name was then used by the Colombian chemist Guillermo Fischer Cárdenas when he actually isolated the compound in 1923. In 1939, it was determined that banisterine, yagéine, and telepathine were all the same as harmine, and that is the name that has been used ever since.

I originally thought that the meme then lay quiescent until resurrected in 1953 by American writer William S. Burroughs in his early novel Junky, where, in his closing meditation on yagé, the "uncut kick," the "final fix," he noted that the drink "is supposed to increase telepathic sensitivity."

But apparently the telepathy meme was less dormant than I thought. In the April 1932 issue of Modern Mechanics is a very brief and unattributed article that says, in its entirety:

Drug Said to Cause Clairvoyance
A South American plant called Yage is believed by natives to have the magical property of enabling the drinker to see great distances or through obstacles. Before the drinker falls asleep everything seems to be filled with hazy bluish rings. As the stupor deepens the sleeper sees vivid visions of things or people known to be somewhere else. This is the reason the drug is supposed to cause clairvoyance.

This brief article is skeptical in tone, gives no author, and provides no source for the information it conveys. I have been able to dig up no further information, although I certainly wonder whether this may be one of the sources that informed Burroughs's view of ayahuasca. Can anyone add anything?

Hallucinogens and Pornography

Given the current climate of moral panic and the attendant assault on Salvia divinorum — possession of which is now a felony, at last count, in thirteen states, although it is hard to keep up — I thought we might do some thinking about drugs and the law generally.

Let us say that I have been arrested for possession of an illegal hallucinogen. Let us say, too, that I possess that substance, not because it is a sacrament in my church, but because I simply want to experience a hallucinatory mental state. Since I cannot rely on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, are there any constitutional arguments available to me?

Here is the rule to keep in mind. Generally speaking, a legislature can constitutionally pass just about any law it wants, as long as the law implicates only what is called a liberty interest — that is, an interest in staying out of prison — and the law passes the rational basis test. That is, to successfully challenge such a law, you would have to convince a court that the law had no rational basis at all — that the legislature was effectively out of its mind when it passed it. Even though that often seems to have been the case, it is difficult to prove in court.

On the other hand, where a fundamental right is involved, the burden shifts to the State to show that the law is narrowly tailored to satisfy a compelling state interest. That is why it is advantageous to frame a challenge to a law prohibiting possession of a hallucinogen as involving a fundamental right rather than a liberty interest.

Free speech is a fundamental right, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. So the question becomes: is there a way to bring my possession of a controlled hallucinogen within the ambit of the Free Speech Clause?

As you would expect, the jurisprudence of the Free Speech Clause is complex, extensive, and not entirely consistent. But there is a body of law that talks about free speech not in terms of speech but rather in terms of freedom of thought. And there is enough Supreme Court language out there condemning "government programs of thought control" to indicate that the state may not attempt to control the contents of my mind. The Supreme Court, according to Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe, "has insisted that the activities actually going on within the head are absolutely beyond the power of government to control." In Stanley v. Georgia, the Court asserted that the State "cannot constitutionally premise legislation on the desirability of controlling a person's private thoughts" — and that would include lustful thoughts, racist thoughts, violent thoughts, and, presumably, hallucinatory thoughts as well.

There is, I think, an arguable analogy here between hallucinogens and pornography, which is a mind-altering technology intended to induce or sustain a state of mind that the Court calls prurience — a state of mind characterized, the Court has put it, by "itching, morbid, or lascivious longings." There are physical instrumentalities for inducing this state of mind, such as books, photographs, and videos. The State may constitutionally prohibit the transport, importation, sale, or mailing of these pornographic instrumentalities, or the public display of pornography itself; but it may not prohibit the private possession of adult pornography in my home.

In Stanley v. Georgia, the defendant had been convicted for possessing pornographic films, which government agents had discovered in his home while searching for evidence of illegal gambling activity. The State argued that it had the same right to protect the minds of its citizens as it had to protect their bodies. But the Supreme Court found it "wholly inconsistent with the philosophy of the First Amendment" to concede to the State "the right to control the moral contents of a person's thoughts."

But suppose we were talking about, not books or films, but rather a plant that induced prurience, called, say, Obscenia prurientis. If I was charged with possession of pornography because I possessed Obscenia prurientis plants, presumably the outcome would be the same. Pruriogenic plants, just like pornographic books and films, are simply an instrumentality for changing the contents of my mind. As long as I don't transport, import, mail, or hand out these plants to others, the State presumably has no more interest in my private possession of a pruriogenic plant than in my private possession of a pruriogenic movie.

And this ought to be true even though such pornographic instrumentalities as books and films might look to a court more like the sorts of communicative technologies that the Free Speech Clause was originally intended to protect. If the goal is to protect states of mind from government constraints, then the nature of the instrument used to induce the state of mind ought to be irrelevant, whether it is a pornographic video, an electronic brain stimulator, the drug Lawrence Tribe called obscenamine, or our imaginary plant Obscenia prurientis.

Here comes the analogy. Suppose we were talking about, not Obscenia prurientis, but another plant — say, Psychotria viridis — whose purpose and effect was to induce a temporary state of hallucination, just as the purpose and effect of Obscenia prurientis is to induce a temporary state of prurience. On what grounds should the outcome differ? If the State has no permissible interest in my private possession of an instrumentality to induce a mental state of prurience, why should the State have a permissible interest in my private possession of an instrumentality to induce a mental state of hallucination?

In both cases, we have an instrumentality which is illegal to possess, and whose function is solely to create a state of mind — prurience on the one hand and hallucinations on the other — that is disfavored by the State. Yet the Supreme Court has said that the State cannot constitutionally prosecute me for possessing pornography — indeed, for using pornography, in the privacy of my home, to alter my state of consciousness. And this is arguably true even if the pruriogenic instrumentality is a plant. It is hard to see why a hallucinogenic plant should treated differently.

Here, of course, the State would argue that there were other harms — health risks, the chance that the plants would fall into the hands of children, failure to meet international obligations under the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances — whose prevention constituted a state interest sufficiently compelling to outweigh my First Amendment right to control the contents of my own mind. But at least, under this argument, the burden is on the State to show that such harms actually exist, that the harms are so serious that the State has a compelling interest in preventing them, and that total prohibition is the least restrictive way of preventing those harms.

Now that would be an argument worth having.

Soccer

As of January 2009, for the season running from February until December, Colegio Nacional Iquitos has been promoted from the Segunda Division to the Primera Division of Peru. This is very important news.

Soccer — which is, of course, fútbol — is played and followed with almost religious intensity throughout Perú. According to sociologist Julio Cotler, soccer played a major role in forging a Peruvian national identity when, in 1970, the Peruvian national team surprisingly eliminated top-ranked Argentina to qualify for the Mexico Cup. For the first time, the games were broadcast nationwide, and soccer became a national passion.

Indeed, in 1996, when Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement guerrillas captured the Japanese embassy in Lima and held 72 hostages for 126 days, the occupation was broken by a surprise raid when the guerrillas had gathered for their daily afternoon soccer game.

Iquitos has two professional soccer clubs — Colegio Nacional Iquitos and Hungaritos, the Hungarians — and several amateur leagues, as well as an endless stream of pick-up street games, which can last for hours, and are played right through the pouring rain. Ribereño villages throughout the Upper Amazon have soccer fields, and often a game is played every day in the evening.

Because some of these ribereño villages are small, they often play a downsized version of soccer called fulbito, with five or six players on a side. Famed writer Mario Vargas Llosa, in his novel The City and the Dogs, describes a fulbito game: “They wore sneakers, … and they made sure the ball was not fully inflated, to keep it from bouncing. Generally they kept the ball on the ground, making very short passes, and trying for goals from very close, without kicking hard.”

Fulbito is thus a close sport, sometimes even played indoors; the MRTA guerrillas were playing fulbito in the embassy grand dining room when the raid occurred. Some commentators have claimed that playing fulbito rather than soccer from childhood has kept Peruvian soccer players from developing kicking power, so that they are considered skilled rather than strong opponents.

Games played against neighboring villages are a major social event, and may involve three or four communities, with wagering, feasts, beer, dancing, and battery-operated CD players blaring cumbias. These games can be very exciting, especially in the rainy season, because the fields become quite muddy and slippery, with spectacular wipe-outs, and everyone winds up covered in mud.

The acculturation of indigenous groups to the ribereño lifestyle almost inevitably includes the adoption of soccer.

The Survival of Plant Knowledge

I swear, the spirits must read this blog. Just a day or so after I blogged about the importance of plant knowledge and the health costs of losing that knowledge, the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine published a comprehensive study of plant use in the culture area encompassed by northern Peru and southern Ecuador.

The study is by two distinguished scholars, ethnobotanist Rainer Bussmann and anthropologist Douglas Sharon, who had previously co-authored two significantly useful books — Plants of the Four Winds: The Magic and Medicinal Flora of Peru and Plants of Longevity: The Medicinal Flora of Vilcabamba. The present study was based on research earlier published here and here.

Rainer Bussmann

Northern Peru and southern Ecuador form a single culture area and share the same flora. Both are heirs of a regional plant healing tradition that goes back as far as the Cupisnique culture of the first millennium BC. But the two areas now show striking differences in plant knowledge and use.

The authors did a comprehensive survey — collecting, identifying, and recording vernacular names, traditional uses, and applications — of 510 plant species used for medicinal purposes in Peru and 215 plant species used for medicinal purposes in Ecuador. The number of species used as medicine indicates that the healers, market vendors, and members of the public whom the authors interviewed in Peru had considerable knowledge of plants in their surroundings, while in Ecuador much of this traditional plant knowledge appears to have been lost. Plants used as medicine in southern Ecuador comprise only forty percent of the species used in northern Peru.

How this difference came to be is particularly interesting.

Colonial chroniclers often included detailed descriptions of useful plants in their reports, and the authors reviewed both earlier and later compilations. In 1780, Martínez Compañon, Archbishop of Trujillo, had a complete inventory of the plants in his dioceses prepared, which covered much of the territory in the present study, and which contained 526 plant species. The work included detailed paintings of each plant, which the authors compared closely to the modern medicinal flora of the region, finding that the vernacular names of most plants had not changed since colonial times. In northern Peru, the number of medicinal plants did not seem to have changed significantly since the late 1700s — more than 500 species were found in both the Compañon survey and in modern Peruvian markets — while in southern Ecuador the number of plants used as medicine had declined significantly.

Douglas Sharon

A closer comparison, however, showed that only 41 percent of the plants described by Compañon were still sold in Peru; the remainder of the contemporary Peruvian pharmacopoeia had been added more recently. Even more, the plants used in Ecuador today remain most similar to those reported in the earlier rather than the later colonial herbals, as though plant knowledge there had become frozen at the time of colonization. This means that, from earliest colonial times, practitioners in both northern Peru and southern Ecuador stopped using a certain number of medicinal plants. But in Peru these plants were replaced by new ones, and in Ecuador the pharmacopoeia simply grew smaller.

So: why should this be? Bussmann and Sharon give a historical explanation. In Ecuador, the colonial Spaniards immediately began the persecution of traditional medical practitioners, while in Peru the colonial administration was much more tolerant. And this difference continued. In the 1980s, the Peruvian government established a National Institute for Traditional Medicine, while in Ecuador traditional medicine remained illegal until a constitutional amendment was passed in 1998. The persecution of traditional medical practitioners in Ecuador inhibited experimentation with new remedies, and the tradition withered.

The lesson here is worth emphasizing: the survival of a tradition of plant medicine lies not in its remaining static, but rather in its ability to experiment, innovate, and adapt. A static knowledge base inevitably shrinks. Persecution in Ecuador did not cause the loss of plant knowledge; it prevented the acquisition of new plant knowledge.

And a further implication is worth drawing as well. This finding runs directly counter to the common assumption that indigenous traditions today have survived through lack of change.

Conference Notes

Three important conferences on shamanism were held in 2008, two of which were not easy to get to from the United States — the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland, March 21–24, and the Fourth Annual Amazonian Shamanism Conference in Iquitos, Peru, July 19–27. A third conference — the 25th International Conference on Shamanism and Alternative Modes of Healing — was held closer to home, in San Rafael, California, August 30–September 1. If you missed these conferences, there are still ways to access at least some of the presentations.

• At the World Psychedelic Forum, more than fifty experts from all over the world met and discussed the psychedelic experience, including such heavy hitters as Stanislav Grof, Ralph Metzner, Jeremy Narby, Jonathan Ott, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Michael Winkelman. An entire day was spent on the topic Legacy of the Shamans: Ancient Traditions and New Dimensions. You can take a look at the whole program here, and a report of the conference is here. Couldn't make it? You can still get audio recordings, for a price. Videos of at least a few of the presentations are available for free here.


• The Fourth Annual Amazonian Shamanism Conference also had a distinguished group of speakers — Pablo Amaringo, Howard Charing, Frank Echenhoffer, Richard Grossman, Martina Hoffman, Jan Kounen, Dennis McKenna, Robert Venosa, and many others. Recordings of a few of these presentations in a variety of audio formats — unfortunately, often of poor sound quality — are available without charge here.
  
  It is likely that videos will also be available soon, but not for free. Soga del Alma, the sponsoring organization, has made available videos from the 2005 and 2006 conferences, under a sort of rental arrangement. For £15 you can watch all thirty-one of the presentations from those two conferences, as streaming video, as often as you wish, for a period of one year. To get a sense of what the videos are like, you can get a free look — although registration is required — at Dennis McKenna's 2005 presentation, Ayahuasca and Human Destiny. That talk, by the way, has now circulated widely, and is available both as a podcast and in its written form.


• The 25th International Conference on Shamanism and Alternative Modes of Healing included presentations by Stanislov Grof, Jürgen Kremer, Stanley Krippner, and many others; you can still see the entire program here. Especially noteworthy were presentations by a number of scholars and practitioners of Mongolian shamanism — Batbayar Gonchigdorj, Purevsuren Begziav, Sumiya Tserendorj, Battsetseg Bataa, and Saruul Magsar. Audio recordings of the conference are available here, but only as a complete set, and they are pricey.

I look forward to the day when all such conference presentations, as a matter of course, will be made immediately available as podcasts and vidcasts.

Weeds

I am always interested to see how ayahuasca and other sacred plants are portrayed in the popular media, from horror movies to reality television to psychedelic westerns. Here is another example.

The quirky television series Weeds was a surprise hit for Showtime. It was the channel's highest rated series in its first year, and its fourth season premier attracted 1.3 million viewers, Showtime's highest-ever viewership. Mary-Louise Parker, as the lead character Nancy Botwin, won a Golden Globe for her performance on the show.

Nancy is a normal suburban soccer mom until her husband Judah suddenly drops dead. To maintain her lifestyle, she begins selling marijuana to her local clientele — her accountant, her lawyer, and other soccer moms. Her entrepreneurial success in the highly competitive drug business complicates a life already made challenging by her strange family and backstabbing friends.

The title of the series is triply significant. It refers to widow's weeds, the traditional dark dress of a woman whose husband has died. It refers, of course, to marijuana. And it refers to the eruption of the unfamiliar and unwanted in the otherwise controlled and artificial environment of the suburban lawn.

In episode 10 of the fourth season, Nancy is faced with a moral dilemma — her discovery that a tunnel to Mexico that she thinks is being used to smuggle drugs is also being used to smuggle humans and weapons. The episode is notable for two things. First, Nancy drinks ayahuasca as a way to deal with her fears and cure a chronic headache. "Peyote magic?" she asks. "Like hallucinogenic magic?" And she is told: "Peyote is a bicycle. Ayahuasca is a rocket ship. Like thirty years of psychotherapy in one night." Despite that, the portrayal of the experience is surprisingly unromanticized:

The second interesting thing about the episode is the music in the background during the ayahuasca scene. If you were too enthralled by Mary-Louise Parker vomiting to listen, go back and pay attention to the music. It is, of course, cumbia amazónica. The song is Sonido Amazonico by the group Chicha Libre, a modern American Brooklyn-based neo-cumbia psychedelic surf music combo put together by Olivier Conan of Barbès Records. The song is derived from a recording by the same name originally performed by the classic cumbia amazónica group Los Mirlos. If you want to hear how guys named Burrows, Camp, Conan, Cudahy, Douglas, and Quigley can play jungle music with real verve and affection, here is the background song in its entirety: